Samsung Laptops Show New NVIDIA 600 Series Mobile GPUs

While at this year’s CES, we received a tip from an unnamed source that there were Kepler GPUs located in some Samsung laptops on the floor. So, we decided to go and check it out for ourselves and surprisingly enough, there were indeed some Mobile 600 series GPUs.

If you take a look at our images below, you will see that we saw two different laptops with one major variation, their GPUs. These were Samsung’s Series 5, 550P5 and 550P7 laptops. The real major difference here was that this one was a Kepler GPU and the other was simply a rebadged Fermi mobile GPU. Both laptops also support NVIDIA’s optimus switching technology.

If you look at the shader cores you can see that the N13P-GT is going to be a mid-range performance part as it features 2GB of dedicated GPU memory as well as 96 CUDA cores and a 405MHz core clock. What’s interesting is that if you compare this to the GT 630 GPU in the 550P7 laptop, you can see that both of them have the same amount of CUDA cores (shaders). The GK-107 part, the N13P-GT is actually clocked lower than the GT 630 GPU in the 550P7 laptop. Either this indicates to us that NVIDIA’s Kepler mobile GPUs really do have an improved performance per clock, or the N13P-GT isn’t as high-end of a part as had been rumored. Both GPUs have the exact same 2GB of DDR3 memory and both have the same 1.8GHz effective memory clock.

The similarity between clocks is really what confuses us, though, since the N13P-GT is a 405MHz part and the 630 GT is a 475MHz part. Those clock differences are followed by similarities in shader clock, which also mimic the GPU clock differential. We’re just not sure why NVIDIA would make two so similar parts unless one was a newer generation part and the other was simply a rebadge.

We’re still not entirely sure whether or not N13P-GT is a Kepler part or not considering its relative similarity to the GT 630 which has been known to be a Fermi rebranded mobile GPU. We are hopeful that we’ve stumbled upon the first Kepler part in a mobile devices, but we remain somewhat cautious about it being one considering all of the similarities.